Music Scene: Two chances to see Matthew Sweet

Friday

Sep 15, 2017 at 7:00 AM

By Jay N. Miller/For The Patriot Ledger

Matthew Sweet has been prolific songwriter since his mid-1980s debut, so the six-year gap since his last album had people wondering. Even the publicity for his new album mentioned him overcoming writer’s block, but the rocker preferred a simpler explanation: life just got in the way.

Sweet’s “Tomorrow Forever” was released in June on his Honeycomb Hideout label, distributed by Sony Red, and he’ll be swinging through the area this week. Sweet and his band perform on Saturday night at Brighton Music Hall, and then on Tuesday at The Narrows Center in Fall River.

“It was not so much writer’s block as just the fact that we moved from Los Angeles to Nebraska, where my family was,” Sweet explained from his Omaha home. “It was the first time we had moved in 20 years. Then, my mother died and we had to deal with that. But it was mainly the move that took up my time. The more I began playing with a few musicians here, the more I got in the mood to start working on songs again.”

Sweet was born and raised in Nebraska, yet is often thought of as part of the Athens, Ga., scene, since he went there to attend college. He became friends with members of R.E.M., played in one of singer Michael Stipe’s side projects, and was in another rock band with Stipe’s sister. Sweet’s own debut record in 1986 didn’t go very far, but it was enough to earn him a contract with A&M Records, which released his second album, “Earth” in 1989. Many fans will remember him for 1991’s “Girlfriend” album, with its infectious, poppy title track. He’s been releasing new music every year or two ever since, with ‘95’s “100% Fun” album yielding the minor hit “Sick of Myself.”

Some other noteworthy Sweet projects include his “Under the Covers” series with singer Susanna Hoffs, beginning in 2006 with Volume One focused on 1960s tunes, 2009’s Volume Two centered on ‘70s tunes, and 2013’s Volume Three consisting of ‘80s tunes. The pair released a box set in 2015 which included all those first three volumes, plus 15 extra songs.

The new album is suffused with Sweet’s love of retro sounds, from the shimmering Byrds-ian guitars of the song “bittersweet,” to the crunching, Neil Young-like chords of “Off the Farm,” to the psychedelic chamber rock, reminiscent of latter-period Beatles of “Pretty Please.” But lyrically the new collection goes deeper, subtly examining what matters in life and love, and reflecting on how passing years provide valuable perspective.

Sweet had written dozens of songs, so whittling them down to the 17 on the new two-CD set had to be difficult.

“Actually the trimming process wasn’t that bad,” said Sweet, 52. “I enlisted friends and family to listen, and everybody immediately agreed on the top 15 or so. I felt my choices were backed up by their reactions. Some had lists of 20-23 songs, so we also made a little satellite disc, of about 12 songs, ‘Tomorrow’s Daughter,’ which we’ve given away to anyone who got downloads of the album. But eventually I think a lot of those un-recorded songs will see the light of day.”

The album’s sequencing serves to kind of portray a journey, not so much a linear narrative as a general impression that the introspective moments all finally coalesce in a sort of wisdom.

“That’s the mysterious thing,” said Sweet. “Usually I have a feeling how they should be sequenced when I’m doing an album. I will typically try this and that, and once you try things it either works or it doesn’t. You know right away if the sequence doesn’t work. Other times it can be just a process of elimination. But I like that part of the process, listening to what I’ve done at the end of it, and taking stock of how it all fits together.”

We mention how “Bittersweet” manages to have those beautifully shimmering guitar textures, yet still sounds rough and gritty.

“Your reaction sounds good to me,” said Sweet. “I like it when you can get real emotion in a track, and it can still be rough and heavy.”

“Pretty Please” melds that ‘Revolution-era Beatles sound with trenchant lines like “it isn’t fair, everything good gets taken away...” And organ is a key part of the arrangement, so we asked if that was where Zombies keyboardist Rod Argent did his guest spot.

“That is actually me on Hammond organ,” Sweet said. “I love all that kind of keyboard stuff that we got in ‘60s garage rock. There’s a certain kind of keyboard spirit I wanted, although I think we could’ve made the record a lot more raw, in my eyes.”

One song certain to have listeners musing about the changes in Sweet’s life is “Hello,” a very melodic pop tune with a tag line “Hello from the future, trying to make things right ... I’m alive again.”

“That the theme of that song, a re-do of time,” Sweet explained. “Imagining yourself in the future to look back and view present times, and how we might see things then. It’s a little nostalgic, I guess.”

Another uplifting number is “Come Correct,” which is buoyant and even funky.

“That’s an unusual style for me,” Sweet said. “Funky is usually the one thing I am not. That one has a bit more of a smart-ass lyric, but it does have a bit of an upbeat quality. I have noticed a lot of people seem to be gravitating to that song.”

Even during his time between new records, Sweet has been touring every year, and no doubt, with this new one being either his 19th or 20th album, he has plenty of material in his songbook.

“On this tour we’ll be a basic four-piece, two guitars, bass and drums,” said Sweet. “We won’t have keyboards with us, so we won’t be doing the songs that require those. We don’t usually play many new songs on a tour, but we have been playing “Trick” and “Pretty Please” and a few others and the audience response has been very good. I have so much old stuff people like to hear, I don’t want to overload a show with too much new material.”

“People want to hear the older stuff, and I like to play it,” Sweet added. “I don’t have things of mine that I hate, so it works out easy. We will usually be doing a wide selection, although we have been trying to move the set a bit away from the ‘Girlfriend’ album. We do some songs off “100% Fun,” and an bunch from my lesser known albums. I try to build sets based on what the room feels like. It will typically be a sort of ‘Greatest Hits and Bits and Pieces’ type show. I wouldn’t go out and just play a whole new album, that wouldn’t be fair to longtime fans. It’s funny; we had stopped doing ‘Evangeline’ from the ‘Girlfriend’ album, figuring nobody would care on our West Coast tour. But somewhere in the Midwest they really wanted to hear it and kept asking, so we learned it again at soundcheck so we could do it.”

Sweet doesn’t normally do any of the ‘Under the Covers’ material on his tours.

“That was just a really fun thing between friends,” he said of the albums with Hoffs. “We did a very few acoustic shows for those, but it is more of a specialty thing. There is some interest in bringing them back, but I just saw Susanna in L.A., and she’s doing several projects, including writing a book.”

The new album is a great guitar-rock album, above all else, and that notion makes Sweet happy, and he relished crafting it all together in his studio, utilizing guests from far and wide.

“I love doing all that stuff in the studio, building up a track on my rhythm guitar, trying some leads, and then singing over it,” Sweet said. “Then I would send the tracks out to my other guitar players, some on the East Coast and some on the West Coast, so we did a lot of this work via email. Everyday I got a track back it was like Christmas to me. Two of the guys I used were Jason Victor, whose sound is more jangly, and John Moreman, who is more psychedelic sounding. On ‘The Searcher’ I tried to make their two guitars sound like call-and-response. I never knew exactly what to expect, and I wanted their imaginations to be a big part of this project. I think we got some really cool guitar sounds.”

Fans were also eager to hear new music from Sweet, and his Kickstarter fundraising campaign hit its goal within a month.

“It has been a really good year so far,” said Sweet. “We’ve toured places we hadn’t been in a long time, a lot of Southern states for instance, like Texas. We’ve had sold out shows in a lot of places we didn’t expect, which has been great. But my best area for fans has traditionally always been the East Coast, so I can’t wait to get up there in Massachusetts.”